Cambridge University Press 0521589177 - The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov Edited by Vera Gottlieb and Paul Allain Excerpt More information 1 CHEKOV IN CONTEXT © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521589177 - The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov Edited by Vera Gottlieb and Paul Allain Excerpt More information 1 ALEXANDERCHUDAKOV Dr Chekhov: a biographical essay E29 January 1860±15 July 1904) Chekhov was a ®rst-generation intellectual: his grandfather was a former serf, his father a small shopkeeper. `There is peasant blood in me', he wrote ELetters, vol. V, p. 283).1 But in the history of Russian culture, the name of Chekhov has become synonymous with intelligence, good upbringing ± and re®nement. How did these qualities come to be acquired by a provincial boy who spent his crucial formative years up to the age of nineteen in a small Russian town? Taganrog, Chekhov's birthplace, was typical of Russian provincial towns of the time: taverns, little shops, `not a single sign without a spelling mistake'; oil lamps, and wastelands thickly overgrown with weeds. Chekhov's memories, of his `green' years growing up in Taganrog, are full of references to puddles and unpaved streets. Taganrog was also a southern port. The second ¯oor of the Chekhovs' house where Anton spent his early secondary school years overlooked the harbour crammed at the height of summer with steamers and sailing ships. One could walk several miles along the shore and not see a single Russian ship ± instead, there were vessels from Turkey, the Greek Archipelago, Italy, Spain: the San Antonio; the Sophia, the Ogios Gerasimos, the Movludi Bagri. They brought wine from Madeira and Asia Minor, lemons, oranges, olive oil from Provence, and spices. Taganrog was the staging post for the supply of provisions to the whole Azov region. By the time Chekhov was born this trade had already passed its peak, but it remained extremely active throughout his schooldays. The streets were ®lled with the babble of foreign languages. Near the port was a street with coffee-shops, and when the weather was ®ne the tables were packed with Turks, Greeks, French and English. Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov's store was on the ground ¯oor of a house, and for a time the ®rst ¯oor housed a casino. Nearby was the London Hotel, with a female band to entertain the sailors in the evenings. Taganrog was the Russian equivalent of the Mediterranean French ports. Pavel Chekhov decided to give his elder sons a Greek education. There were six children: ®ve boys and one girl, Maria Chekhova. Chekhov's 3 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521589177 - The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov Edited by Vera Gottlieb and Paul Allain Excerpt More information alexander chudakov younger brother, Michael, recalled: `At that time rich Greeks were the cream of Taganrog society . and father was convinced his children should follow the Greek example, and perhaps even complete their educa- tion at Athens University.'2 So Anton and his brothers were sent to the Greek school. Nothing came of this, though they spent one year studying under the terrifying headmaster, Nikolai Vuchina.3 They spent the whole summer bathing in the sea, swimming long distances. When Chekhov, by then a well-known writer, was returning from Sakhalin via the Indian Ocean, he amused himself by diving from the bow of the ship while it was sailing at full speed, and catching a rope hanging from the stern. Once he saw a shark in the company of pilot-®sh. This episode is described in his story, `Gusev' E1890). The impressions of a winter sea with its terrible storms are re¯ected in Chekhov's story `On Christmas Night' E1883). Taganrog was a southern town, surrounded closely on all sides by the Steppe. Anton and his brothers spent their summer holidays in the village of Knyazhi with their grandfather, a steward on the estate of Countess Platova. The village was forty miles from the town and the journey in a bullock cart took more than a day. At night they camped out on the Steppe, under the stars. After six years at grammar school, Anton spent a summer on the estate of the parents of his private pupil, Petya Kravtsov. That summer, the Taganrog student and `tutor' became a skilled shot and an excellent horseman. Many years later, in 1898, Chekhov wrote: `I love the Don Steppe. At one time it was like home to me and I knew every little gully' ELetters, vol. VII, p. 322). The Steppe landscapes are described in his earliest stories E`29th June' and `The Mistress' E1882)), and in his ®rst major work, the story `The Steppe' E1888). From childhood experience of the Steppe, nature became a part of his very being. During his trip to Siberia in 1890, he took delight in studying nature at close quarters, and in his letters he describes with rapture how for a whole month he watched the sunrise from beginning to end. He was acutely aware of his bond with nature; his moods reacted to the changes in the weather like a barometer. The in¯uence that nature exerts on the human psyche is re¯ected in stories such as `The Student' E1894) and `The Murder' E1895). So trees, ¯owers, clouds, dogs and wolves feel and think like people, as demonstrated in `Aga®a', `Rusty' E`Kashtanka'), `Patch' E`Beloloby', 1895) and `Terror' E1892). They grieve, rejoice, worry and feel sad. Many Russian writers have portrayed nature and animals. Perhaps the works of Sergei Aksakov or Mikhail Prishvin4 will survive to become unique evidence of how our planet used to be, and what amazing creatures lived on it. But for the present, we are more concerned with the experience of Chekhov who wrote not about the solitary life of man at one with nature and the birds of the 4 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521589177 - The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov Edited by Vera Gottlieb and Paul Allain Excerpt More information Dr Chekhov: a biographical essay air, but about the everyday encounters of modern civilised man pursuing an urban existence, living in a ¯at or a suburban dacha. Both in his writing and in his personal life, Chekhov offered us examples to follow in our dealings with our fellow creatures. The theatre in Taganrog was far from typical of the Russian provincial stage. How many of the smaller theatres could be regularly visited by touring Italian opera companies? Or by Sarasate,5 or Liszt's pupil, Laura Carer. Tommaso Salvini sang the title role in Otello. The repertoire featured operettas by SuppeÂ, Lehar, Lecocq and Offenbach. Perhaps these other aspects of Taganrog served only to accentuate `the lethargy and boredom' of day-to-day reality. On 23 August 1868 Anton Chekhov entered the preparatory class of the grammar school, where he was to study for the next eleven years Ehe repeated the third and ®fth years). It was a classical grammar school and special signi®cance was ascribed to the study of classical languages. At the graduation examinations, Chekhov got top grades in German and Scrip- ture. In his earlier years the young Anton was hindered by having to help his father in the shop after school, working there until late at night. But if the work at the shop ± under the sign `Tea, Coffee and Other Groceries' ± did not help Chekhov make progress at school, it certainly helped him in his creative writing. The shop sold a variety of goods, including oil, ®sh, ¯our, tobacco, buttons, coffee, knives, confectionery, candles, spades, shoe polish, and herrings. It provided not only an education in objects, but it also served as an animated lexicon. A shop in the provinces was a kind of club where people went not only to buy things, but also to drink a glass of vodka or wine. It was frequented by cooks, shop assistants, the wives of of®cials, policemen, cab-drivers, ®shermen, teachers, school students, and sailors. They all talked, so from his early childhood Anton listened to the language of people of the most varied occupations. Later critics were to be amazed by Chekhov's knowledge of nautical terms, the language of timber merchants or of haberdashery assistants. From early childhood Chekhov was kept busy with domestic chores: he shopped, cleaned the ¯at, fetched water from the well and even did the laundry. Household duties are exhausting in their monotony, in the mean- ingless repetition day after day of the same tasks, and such duties are especially burdensome for a young person. And not only for a young person ± Chekhov would show later in his writing how anyone who lives only in the material world and lacks the ability to resist it becomes completely sti¯ed by the everyday, and then the spiritual gives way completely to the material. In describing this situation, Chekhov understood this not merely as a detached observer but knew it from personal experience. 5 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521589177 - The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov Edited by Vera Gottlieb and Paul Allain Excerpt More information alexander chudakov No less forcibly, Chekhov was exposed from early childhood to the full force of the Church Slavonic language through compulsory church atten- dance, singing in the church choir, religious rituals at home and studying the Bible. But all this `brought A. P. into contact with the beautiful ancient language of Church Slavonic, never allowing him to forget it, as happened with the great majority of Russian intellectuals, and nurturing in him an acute feeling for the simple vernacular tongue'.6 Thus this childhood, divided by the airless store and the open sea, the corridors of the grammar school and the endless Steppe, between the narrow milieu of the petty clerks and the free and easy natural life of the country people, offered a vivid contrast between nature and the material world which promised to foster an artist with a most unconventional aesthetic perception of life.